Coin dispensers have been used for a number of years. Coin dispensers have relieved cashiers of the burden of manually handling and counting coins. Banks, casinos, and retail stores are some of the beneficiaries of these machines. As would be expected, these businesses wish to process their coins as quickly and accurately as possible.
Coin dispensers typically contain stacks of coins of several denominations. In the United States, coin dispensers usually contain stacks of quarters, dimes, nickels, and pennies. In a common retail environment, once a customer has provided currency to the cashier to pay for merchandise, the cashier enters the amount paid by the customer at the cash register. The cash register then calculates the amount of “change” that must be returned to the customer, and sends a signal to the coin dispenser instructing it to release a certain combination of coin denominations to be returned to the customer. The coin dispenser releases the coins, which travel along a coin chute that leads to a coin bin where the customer can manually remove the coins. Consequently, the efficiency of the transaction is increased since the cashier is not required to count or handle the coins to be returned to the customer.
In addition to this general retail application, coin dispensers are also useful in several types of automated retail machines. In such systems, the customer provides the automated retail machine with currency, selects an item to be purchased, receives the item from the machine, and may also receive change from the machine that corresponds to the difference between the inputted currency and the cost of the selected item. Again, in this situation, a signal is sent to a coin dispenser instructing it to release a certain coin combination to the customer. Other common uses for dispensers include “change” machines that exchange paper currency or electronic media for coins.
Coin dispensers include one or more coin cassettes that contain the coin stacks. Each coin cassette may include receptacles for each of the denominations to be used by the coin dispenser, or one coin cassette may be dedicated to a specific denomination. The coin cassettes are often a block of material having generally cylindrical receptacles in which the coin stacks reside. The coin receptacles typically intersect a side surface of the coin cassettes such that a portion of the coin stack may reside outside the periphery of the block of material, thereby making it easy to visualize how many coins remain in the receptacle.
One of the problems that has existed for some time in coin dispensers relates to filling the coin cassettes. Often, the coin cassettes are manually filled by repetitiously placing small stacks of coins into the coin receptacles to fill each receptacle. This can be quite a time-consuming process.
Thus, a need exists for a device that can quickly fill a coin cassette. It would be further advantageous if such a device had the ability to be quickly filled by a standard coin sorting machine or coin counting machine.